The Atlanta Campaign: One Hundred Days That Changed the War

In the spring of eighteen sixty-four, the Union's war in the West came down to a single objective: Atlanta. The city was the Confederacy's most important industrial hub south of Richmond, a rail junction where five major lines converged, a center of iron foundries, rolling mills, and munitions manufacturing. Whoever held Atlanta controlled the logistical spine of the Deep South.

General William Tecumseh Sherman left Chattanooga in early May with three armies totaling roughly one hundred thousand men. Opposing him was General Joseph Johnston with approximately sixty thousand Confederate troops. Johnston's strategy was to delay, fall back, and bleed Sherman's supply lines, hoping to drag the campaign into autumn and hand Lincoln a defeat that would cost him the November presidential election. Abraham Lincoln's re-election was not guaranteed in eighteen sixty-four. A war-weary North was listening to peace candidates.

Sherman's response was to refuse Johnston the frontal assault Johnston needed. Instead he flanked, repeatedly, forcing Johnston back through a series of defensive lines. Allatoona Pass. Dallas. The bloody frontal assault at Kennesaw Mountain on June twenty-seventh, where Sherman lost nearly three thousand men in a single day and learned his lesson. Then around Kennesaw again. Then Peachtree Creek.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis, furious at the retreating, replaced Johnston with John Bell Hood on July seventeenth. Hood attacked immediately and was defeated at Peachtree Creek, then again on July twenty-second in what became known as the Battle of Atlanta. By September first, Hood had no choice but to evacuate. Union troops under General Slocum occupied Atlanta on September second, eighteen sixty-four.

The telegram arrived in Washington that evening. The effect was electric. Lincoln's re-election, which had seemed in doubt, was now assured. Sherman would burn what he could not use, and then march to the sea. The fall of Atlanta did not just end a campaign. It ended the Confederacy's last real hope.